Based on Friday’s and Saturday’s grosses, weekend #3 of 2014 now looks like $160 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, even better than it looked yesterday and now 47% above the average for the comparable weekend the past few years. Opening at 2,663 theaters Friday, Ride Along from Universal grossed $14.5 million Friday and $16.7 million Saturday, […]

  AMERICAN HUSTLE walked away with the big prize at tonight’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, winning the accolade for Best Ensemble Cast of a Motion Picture.  Although the Ensemble Cast Award is commonly considered SAG’s equivalent of a “Best Picture” honor, it really isn’t, because not every Oscar contender is notable for its ensemble (GRAVITY […]

  OPENINGS:  Kevin Hart has been hanging around the edges of being a movie star for a few years now, and RIDE ALONG (Universal) makes it official.  With a $14.5M Friday start, it could challenge Cloverfield for the Martin Luther King weekend title, currently at $46.1M.  For Universal, this is the start of a nicely […]

  FOX:  Any hope that ENLISTED could find itself some helpful word-of-mouth faded as its 2d episode fell 0.1 from the premiere to 0.6.  It was again 0.1 below RAISING HOPE, itself down 0.1 to 0.7.  Neither could complain about its 8PM lead-in, since BONES was relatively robust at a steady 1.5. NBC:  DATELINE was even […]

Based on Friday’s grosses, weekend #3 of 2014 looks like $156 million for the top 12 films Friday-Sunday, up 33% to 43% from the comparable weekends the past few years. Opening at 2,663 theaters Friday, Ride Along from Universal grossed $14.5 million Friday, putting the buddy comedy on track for a $39.5 million opening three-day weekend (way above […]

  Although it also stars (and is produced by) Ice Cube, RIDE ALONG (Universal) goes down in the books as a big win for Kevin Hart, the focus of the movie’s marketing campaign.  Based on preliminary numbers at The Hollywood Reporter, the action comedy is on its way to a $40M+ 4-day Martin Luther King […]

  American Idol‘s woes continued last night.  (So did everyone else’s.) FOX:  On a year-to-year basis, Thursday’s plunge for AMERICAN IDOL was even worse than Wednesday’s, down an awful 1.7 from last season’s 2d night to 3.9.  There seems to be a real chance that this will be the first season Idol has sub-3 numbers […]

  It’s Showtime’s turn at TCA, so along with announcing some series pick-ups (Happyish with Philips Seymour Hoffman, and the probably self-explanatory The Affair), some premiere dates were unveiled. On Sunday, April 13, NURSE JACKIE and CALIFORNICATION make their returns (this will be the final season of the latter) in the 9PM hour, followed by […]